I should probably explain how I got here.
Most gravel racers come from a road cycling background, or they were triathletes, or they grew up doing long rides on mountain bikes in the hills. My route in was a bit different. I grew up in Blackpool playing football, and for a long time that was what I thought I was going to do with my life.
Blackpool, and What Sport Teaches You
Blackpool is not known as a cycling hub. It’s flat, it’s coastal, it’s the kind of place where you play football on winter nights under floodlights and think that’s perfectly normal. I played from early childhood through my teenage years and into young adulthood. It taught me things I still use every day: how to compete as part of a team, how to handle losing, how to push through the physical discomfort of consecutive hard days, how to be accountable to other people who are depending on you to perform.
None of that transfers directly to bike racing, but all of it does. If you understand how to compete — really compete, not just participate — then you can apply that understanding to almost any sport.
The transition to cycling started in my mid-twenties. I’d been active all my life and I needed something that suited where I was physically. A friend suggested cycling. I got a road bike. Within eighteen months I was racing.
Road Racing: The UCI Years
I spent several years racing on the road, which took me further than I’d expected. I joined DAS-Hutchinson, a UCI Continental team, and competed at a level I hadn’t imagined possible when I first clipped into a pair of pedals. The Tour de Suisse. Dwars door Vlaanderen in Belgium. Races broadcast on Eurosport, on courses I’d previously only watched from my sofa.
Professional road racing is relentless. It is also, if I’m honest, not perfectly suited to the way my body works. I’m built for long, sustained efforts across terrain that varies — for days that require stubbornness and pacing rather than explosive speed on a flat run-in. Road racing rewards that sometimes, but it also rewards things I’ll never have: a sprint finish, the ability to accelerate repeatedly at the end of a stage, the tactical play of a flat race.
I was good enough to compete at UCI level. I was not going to be a road race winner. That’s an honest assessment, not a self-deprecating one.
The Crash, and What Came After
In 2024 I had a serious crash in Belgium — three pelvic fractures and a sacrum fracture. Nine months off the bike. I wrote about this elsewhere, and I won’t go into it all again here, except to say: coming back from that injury changed how I thought about what I wanted from cycling.
I wanted to find the version of the sport where my specific strengths — endurance, mental durability, comfort with discomfort — were genuinely decisive. Not a factor, but decisive.
Sean Yates, my coach at the time, pointed me toward gravel.
The First Ride on Gravel
I remember the first time I went out properly on a gravel bike. Not a road with a few rough patches — actual gravel, a long route through the Pennines, loose surface, no markings, hours of it. I was immediately slower than I expected, immediately more alert than I expected, and immediately more engaged than I’d been on a bike in years.
Gravel removes a lot of the infrastructure of road racing — the team cars, the closed roads, the predictable surfaces — and replaces it with self-sufficiency. You carry what you need. You navigate. You make decisions about pacing and nutrition over many hours with no external input. For someone who spent their career in team sport and then road cycling, that independence was startling. I loved it almost immediately.
I did a couple of local events. Then I entered the British National Gravel Championships because Sean suggested it and I thought: why not?
That race, in Dalby Forest in September 2025, was the third gravel event I’d ever done. I won it.
What Football and Gravel Have in Common
People sometimes ask how football prepared me for cycling, and I usually say it didn’t, directly. The technical skills are completely different. The physical demands are structured differently. You can’t use a ball skill in a bike race.
But the competitive mentality — the willingness to go into a race genuinely trying to win rather than just trying to finish well — that came from football. In football, you don’t get on the pitch and think “I hope to be in the top twenty percent today.” You play to win. You compete.
That sounds obvious, but it’s less common in amateur and semi-professional cycling than you’d think. A lot of people race to complete. I race to compete. The difference comes from a background in team sport where results matter and excuses don’t.
The 2026 Plan
I’m writing this in January, a week before the season starts properly. Santa Vall in Girona is in five weeks. The UCI Gravel World Series, the Gravel Earth Series, Unbound Gravel in Kansas, the Rift in Iceland, Badlands across Andalusia. A year built around the biggest events in the sport, in the national champion’s jersey.
I’m a gravel racer now. I came from football and road cycling and a crash in Belgium and nine months of physio sessions and a conversation with a coach who knew before I did that this was where I was supposed to be.
Strange path. Right destination.
Merlin Cycles, Ventum Racing, OGT, Gravaa, and Questa Financial Planning make the 2026 season possible. Coached by Jacob Tipper at JT Performance Coaching.